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Even for the Chutzpah Kings of Turtle Bay the UN Global Compact maneuver is outrageous. Space aliens, come to visit after getting Kurt Waldheim’s golden record invitation, might experience a certain level of understandable confusion after reading Ms. Rosett’s wonderful elucidation of the ways and means of the UN’s Global Compact effort. You see, their only guide to things UN would be that quaint and moldy document, The United Nations Charter. It’s a funny thing, but if memory serves, there was something in that document about reaffirming “faith in fundamental human rights” (an inclusion stemming from careless editing, no doubt, and assiduously avoided in practice), and about developing, “friendly relations among NATIONS based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” (caps are mine). Curiously, I recall no mention in The Charter of providing office space and support for entities not part of the UN to engage in corporate glad-handing and pocket-picking. But then Kofi Annan’s reign produced more than a few freaks of nature
The Global Compact strikes me as a prime example, though with a new and disturbing twist, of a technique that became a hallmark of the Annan years at the UN. Call it The Blenderizer. Throw in unequal parts of phantom private and public funding, NGO involvement, UN pseudo-philosophy/totalitarian governance gibberish, complete lack of oversight, complete financial opacity, supreme arrogance, and, appearing for the first time here in the Global Compact recipe, major corporate involvement — and hit the purée button. Once The Blenderizer operation is complete, it is impossible for anyone to know (except for Ms. Rosett whose laser vision in these matters should be patented!) just what’s going on, or what the original constituent parts actually were.
Considered from another perspective, The Global Compact is a poison smoothie designed ultimately to bypass and kill off national sovereignty, the institutions of elective government, and the democratic process. That may sound like a tall order for what is billed as a glorified UN finishing school for bien pensant “corporate citizens”, and for what actually only seems to offer opportunities for galactic networking. It is, in fact, the next stage in the UN agenda to become the world government, adding corporations to the mix of NGO’s, fusing them together into a governing elite, a “compact” for “governance” in UN-speak, or as the UNGC put it, fostering “public-private partnerships” to facilitate “collective solution-finding”.
The Global Compact embodies the whole UN notion of “governance” put into action. “Governance” is a slippery sort of word hatched in the Maurice Strong inspired “Our Global Neighborhood” blueprint for our collectivist future. Governance amounts to governmental rule by unelected actors. Did you or I vote for Ted Turner or George Soros or any NGO to solve our “collective” problems? Do you think we’ll have any say in how they decide to solve those problems? Have you seen Elf-Total or Credit Suisse on a ballot lately? In this construct, the action of governing seems to take place by an unseen hand — and, believe me, it has nothing to do with free markets. One has to be in a very odd place in one’s head to have come up with such a locution as “governance”. The end result, nonetheless, boils down to, fait accompli, totalitarian “governance”, no need for the messy and time consuming process of the ballot box, no need for nation states or sovereign governments.
I can’t help but wonder……. can this level of obscurantism have been achieved without the participation, or, at least, benediction of the MasterBlender, Maurice Strong? Though he seems to have decamped to Beijing (for the fabulous take-out?), the Ban Secretariat is still run by his folk. And what of those other blended smoothies, Mark Malloch-Brown (now Baron Malloch-Brown of St. Leonard’s Forest, since his elevation to the post of Minister of State for Africa, Asia, and the United Nations in Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government in Great Britain.) and George Soros? Were they on the guest list for the Geneva Compact fiesta? They could be said to be the early adopters (co-inventors with Mr. Strong?) of The Blenderizer technique with their collaboration at UNDP during Mr. Brown’s tenure as its head. One cannot help but wonder what their involvement in the Global Compact operation might be.
One would have thought that the UN, top-heavy with scandal after scandal, rather like some odd baroque wedding cake, would have tipped over into the East River long ago from the weight of it all. While I’ve heard no reports, yet, of the Secretariat building making its way down river towards the Brooklyn Bridge like Phlegyas’ ferry, great results, at times, require patience. Ms. Rosett’s lapidary work brings us, with each new article, closer to the tipping point, which will lead, finally, to true reform, or dissolution. Sometimes the laws of Nature work slowly, but they work inexorably. Nature does not like static extremes, and does not have a record of unending tolerance for imbalance. Nature ultimately is a self-correcting system.